Way to go. My personal favorite alternate universe is the one where like 90% of the males where killed by a virus that attacked the Y chromosome and the males where all on breeding farms and provided with as many attractive breeding age females as they could service in a day. Hell the rest of you can leave I'm staying here to do my duty to um help ensure the genetic diversity in this universe.

So hanging in my living room I have a framed print of a Van Gogh landscape. Not one of his most famous but I like it. Someone once suggested it hang it in a less-conspicuous place because "it's kind of a dull painting." I asked if they realized it was a print of a Van Gogh. A look of respect suddenly crossed that person's face and that was that.

Seems to me that if you can't tell the difference between the Master's hand and the work of one of his students, it's a pretty damned good painting. And you should display it regardless. Or *not* display it if you didn't think it was good enough the first time around.

/yeah, I get that it'll bring in more people who will pay money to say "ooooh" to a painting they otherwise wouldn't care about.

"School of" paintings were often collective works. Long before Andy Warhol, artists took advantage of their apprentices to increase production. They would have their students paint the busy work (backgrounds, the figure) and would fill in the fine details such as faces and hands. Sometimes they even introduced specialization into their workshops, with the "hand" man doing the hands, and other artists painting clothes or backgrounds or eyes.

This was especially true in the centres of art production where young artists were a florin a dozen.

It is pretty much a crap shoot whether an "expert" can recognize the work of a master and when the masters pupils are themselves masters, it becomes almost impossible to say who painted what.

Forgers have complicated the process of authentication because some of them are so good they are better than the masters--the masters had a lot of off days but the forgers are always on. People want to believe they've found a Great Master.

To quote my fellow New Brunswicker, Lord Beaverbrook, "Buy Old Masters. They age better than old mistresses." The Lord Beaverbrook Museum in Fredericton, New Brunswick has a small collection with a few fine works but are constantly engaged with the heirs of Lord Beaverbrook over who owns what. There might be nothing there when you show up.

Canadians collected a lot of great art during the Railway Boom in the 1800s but almost all of it is gone because their children and grandchildren were thriftless bastards and a waste of air. The Square Mile in Montreal could have kept some great museums in business for centuries. They could have been run at a tidy profit even without buckets of government money.

There but for the grace of God goes ... all those Rembrandts!

I wouldn't mind a few Rembrandts. He used himself and his wife as models very often. One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin (this Shakespeare quotation is about vanity, not bunnies).

brimed03:So hanging in my living room I have a framed print of a Van Gogh landscape. Not one of his most famous but I like it. Someone once suggested it hang it in a less-conspicuous place because "it's kind of a dull painting." I asked if they realized it was a print of a Van Gogh. A look of respect suddenly crossed that person's face and that was that.

Seems to me that if you can't tell the difference between the Master's hand and the work of one of his students, it's a pretty damned good painting. And you should display it regardless. Or *not* display it if you didn't think it was good enough the first time around.

/yeah, I get that it'll bring in more people who will pay money to say "ooooh" to a painting they otherwise wouldn't care about.

Rembrandt was a bit more nefarious though. He often had his students copy his painting and then Rembrandt sold the copy as an original. A few years ago two museums realized they both had the exact same painting hanging.

Way to go. My personal favorite alternate universe is the one where like 90% of the males where killed by a virus that attacked the Y chromosome and the males where all on breeding farms and provided with as many attractive breeding age females as they could service in a day. Hell the rest of you can leave I'm staying here to do my duty to um help ensure the genetic diversity in this universe.

more likely we'd be overrun by the women and put on life support systems and had the semen "farmed" out of us with machines. The women would simply develop lesbian pairings and use our sperm only for procreation. Male children would be sent to the farm and female children would get to live the "upper-class" life.

TedCruz'sCrazyDad:brimed03: So hanging in my living room I have a framed print of a Van Gogh landscape. Not one of his most famous but I like it. Someone once suggested it hang it in a less-conspicuous place because "it's kind of a dull painting." I asked if they realized it was a print of a Van Gogh. A look of respect suddenly crossed that person's face and that was that.

Seems to me that if you can't tell the difference between the Master's hand and the work of one of his students, it's a pretty damned good painting. And you should display it regardless. Or *not* display it if you didn't think it was good enough the first time around.

/yeah, I get that it'll bring in more people who will pay money to say "ooooh" to a painting they otherwise wouldn't care about.

Rembrandt was a bit more nefarious though. He often had his students copy his painting and then Rembrandt sold the copy as an original. A few years ago two museums realized they both had the exact same painting hanging.

Neat story, but it only reinforces my point. Two museums with two expert staffs and two of the same painting. If they can't tell, why make a fuss? You want accuracy, change the info card next to it, but if you need to bring in the world's best experts to decide which is the "true" one-- and really, that's now more expert opinion than established fact-- then it's silly to make a distinction. They're both lovely, nearly identically so, and valid for inspiration, edification, or what have you.

Yes, many of us-- myself included-- have a strong itch about wanting to know for sure which is genuine (yes, my doctor confirmed that's what the itch is about, thankyouverymuch). But that's a separate issue from whether or not to hang it. This is like wine connoisseurs who bomb those blind tests where they're given two "expensive" wines and don't realize they're both run-of-the-mill. If the painting "wasn't good enough" for them to hang it before they knew it was a Remmy, then it's not good enough now. And vice versa.